InformationWeek 500: Government Innovators

With projects ranging from safer Web browsing to a 21st century air traffic control system, federal, state, and local agencies demonstrate that they, too, can apply IT in critical and novel ways.

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' CMS Dashboard is a first step in making timely data from the nation's largest health insurance program more widely available to the public, policy makers and healthcare providers. After six months of internal testing, CMS Dashboard was launched as a beta site in April. In its first iteration, the site lets users track Medicare spending on inpatient hospital services by state, by the top 25 diagnosis-related groups and by the top 10 hospitals in each state. An example of the federal "open government" initiative, CMS Dashboard uses business intelligence technology to make data available in bar and bubble charts, time-series graphs, and grid tables. Plans call for data sets from other CMS programs to be added to CMS Dashboard.